


New Jersey (Only the Strong Survive)

by lemonistas



Category: Jonas Brothers
Genre: M/M, don't ask me why i kept sending nick to harvard in fic he'd never get in
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-28
Updated: 2019-06-28
Packaged: 2020-05-28 19:21:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19400731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonistas/pseuds/lemonistas
Summary: Sunburns, political protest dioramas, and making out with your brother -- this is what happens when Nick Jonas, internationally famous pop star and notoriously maladjusted teenager, wakes up in a world where he and his brothers never got famous. He's merely Nick Jonas, Harvard University freshman and summertime resident of Wyckoff, New Jersey, and as weird as he finds the whole situation, he's pretty relieved to be in a universe where his brother Joe is actually speaking to him...





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Importing old fic from LJ - originally posted 8/17/2010. If you got here by Googling yourself, hit the back button NOW.

Nick Jonas will always remember Christmas Day 2005 for the following reasons:

1\. He, Joe, and Kevin all received a PSP. No, not individually -- they got _one_ , and they were meant to share it. (Frankie would end up monopolizing it, but that's a story for another time.)

2\. His mother put the twice-baked potatoes into the oven one too many times, and they ate their thrice-baked potatoes with steak knives and barbecue tongs.

3\. Kevin picked out a melody on the guitar that would later become "When You Look Me in the Eyes."

4\. He almost died on the living room floor.

*

Nick is thirteen and too skinny, only just learning to inject himself with the insulin that keeps him alive, and everyone's watching him a bit too closely as Kevin Sr. puts _It's a Wonderful Life_ into the VCR. He's wearing an old t-shirt of Joe's, plucked from a duffel bag of what he hopes is clean laundry, and it gapes in all the wrong places on his bony torso. Nick hates this, of course; his mother thinks it's because he can't control it, and his father thinks it's because it slows him down, and Kevin just worries around him all the time, a mother hen in a SMET hoodie and a bandanna. Joe's the only one who knows what he hates most -- that no one in their family will ever let him forget, even for a minute, that he's suddenly fragile, breakable in a way he'd never been before.

"I want more ice cream," Frankie says to nobody in particular, and Nick moves to get off the couch until he feels his mother's arm holding him back.

"Kevin can get it," she says firmly, like even being in close proximity to refined sugar will throw Nick into diabetic shock, and he sees the worry lines around her eyes that weren't there before they started touring. His mother is young and beautiful, but this year's been hard on everyone -- seeing the country from the back of a van and playing to half-empty malls, dodging bill collectors during the rare stretches they're actually at home in New Jersey, learning how to give Nick insulin shots in the event he couldn't do it himself.

The only thing that keeps them going is the fact that Nick loves music more than he loves breathing, and even then, he knows the family has their doubts.

Kevin should be getting ready for his senior prom, and Joe should be trying out for the track team; instead, they're finishing their education between sparsely attended concert sets, Kevin skipping the SATs in favor of a coveted recording session, and Joe struggling through algebra until he cons JT and Garbo and their respective high school diplomas into giving him the answers. They're doing it because Nick has a dream, and it's huge and overwhelming and right now -- with the heat turned down low because they can't afford oil, with Joe pressed into him and clutching the lone Midtown CD Kevin had given him under the tree – it makes him a little sick.

A lot sick, actually, he amends as the room begins to spin. He takes a deep breath and ignores the glances both Joe and his mother shoot in his direction.

"I'm fine," he says, pointedly, turning towards the television and watching the old-timey titles scroll across.

_It's a Wonderful Life_ is a Jonas tradition, what with its classic charm and its easy morality, and they all usually watch in rapt silence. They're supposed to realize how lucky they really are, Nick knows, and he guesses it could be worse. They still technically have a house, after all, and some kids don't even _get_ Christmas. No one in the world ever gets to live their dreams, but Nick's already been on Broadway and recorded an album, and he's running around the country with his brothers, doing the only thing he's ever been able to imagine doing, and he had a lot of Christmas ham, and it's not like anyone _died_ or anything.

Kevin cuts the lights on his way back into the living room, and Nick tries to let himself relax, tries to sink into the couch and absorb the warmth radiating from Joe and Mom, but he can't. His head feels like it's going to float away, while his limbs are too heavy for him to lift. Nearly halfway through the movie, he manages to pull himself up and stand, bracing himself on Joe's shoulder for stability.

"I'm going to get some water," he hears himself say quietly, and then his knees are buckling and he's on the floor, the carpet rough and scratchy beneath his palms. He catches a glimpse of his mother's face staring down at him, and he thinks he hears Joe scream in the distance before everything goes black.

Nick doesn't know how long he's out for, but when he comes to, he's stretched out on the floor with Joe's legs underneath his head. Frankie is curled up on the couch, face frozen in confusion, and Kevin is squatting next to Nick on the floor, his hand resting on the inside of Nick's elbow. His father is framed in the doorway, cell phone in hand, and his mother is holding an empty syringe. He struggles to sit up, feeling the blessed insulin making its way into his bloodstream, but he fails; he flops back against Joe's legs and feels his older brother's hand card through his curls.

“Mom?” he manages, voice weak.

His mother nods. “You scared us, baby.” The words are tight, and Nick doesn’t miss the glance she throws at his father. He hopes, for Kevin Sr.’s sake, that he’s on the phone with North Jersey Medical Associates and not anyone associated with Columbia Records. He’s not optimistic, though.

He knows why his father keeps pushing this; they’re nearly a hundred grand in debt and close to ruin, and the only reason they haven’t lost the house yet is because Nick offered up the money sitting in his college fund that’s been there since he released his solo album a million years ago. It’s not selfishness, Nick thinks – they really can’t afford to fail, this time. They don’t even have health insurance, now, and Nick feels a pang of guilt for wasting an expensive shot when he should have been checking his levels more.

“I’m okay,” he says, rolling his shoulders and moving up, incrementally. He tilts his head and sees Joe, face white and lips pulled thin, and he hates himself a little bit for not being able to stop this.

“You’re not,” Kevin says firmly, and Nick notices that he’s pulled off his neck bandanna and wrapped it around the spot on Nick’s arm where his mother must have administered the shot. He wants to laugh, but he doesn’t have the energy. “You’re tired, Nick, and you’re not taking care of yourself. You don’t have _time_ to take care of yourself.”

“Kevin,” Joe says, but his eldest brother is off and running.

“I’ve _seen_ you, and I’ve _seen_ how many times you’d just forget to check your levels if Joe wasn’t standing over you with your kit. I’m sorry, but I’m _not_ okay with the fact that the only thing keeping you alive is _Joe_ , who can’t even remember what he had for breakfast this morning.”

“I had eggs,” Joe shoots back defensively, and Nick suddenly realizes that this isn’t the first time his brothers have had this conversation. “So did you, and so did Nick, and so did everyone else in this house, and who died and made you _Dad?”_

“Joseph,” Mom barks, and the room goes deafeningly quiet.

“I’m not being _Dad,”_ Kevin retorts as his father strides back into the room. “What did they say?”

Dad pockets his cell phone and sighs. “We can’t cancel,” he says, and Nick groans inwardly. “They’re only letting us into the studio as a favor to someone or other, and they can’t reschedule. We’ve got to get in there tomorrow, or who knows when you boys will be able to record again?”

Nick nods, but no one else does.

“Paul Kevin Jonas,” Denise says through gritted teeth, “your son just _collapsed.”_

“Yes, Denise, I was here for that,” his father replies, “and I’ll thank you to remember that I care about these boys just as much as you do.”

“Then start acting like it,” his mother says, unwavering and deadly, and for all Dad’s prosthelytizing about the man being the head of the household, everyone in the room knows he won’t _dare_ say anything in response.

Joe hooks one hand under Nick’s arm and helps him sit up. “We can’t record tomorrow,” he says. “Nick’s half-dead right now.”

“If we don’t record now, we’ll _never_ record,” Dad says, settling down on the couch. “You’re looking at three months out of the studio, at least. Maybe more. What do you boys plan on doing until March?”

Kevin, the younger one, looks thoughtful. “We could write, some. Catch up on schoolwork, so we won’t have to do it when we go out on the road next time. Give Nick a chance to rest up and get his levels back to normal. We could do a lot of things that we never have the chance to do ordinarily.”

There goes Kevin.

“No,” Nick protests, but his voice is strained and quiet, and Joe shushes him.

“Maybe we _should_ take a break,” he says, and Nick wants to glare at him, but he doesn’t have the strength he needs to shoot Joe the look of utter disdain he feels right now. “You can be as mad as you want, Nick, but it’s three months. You’re going to _die_ if you don’t slow down, okay?”

And there goes Joe.

Nick looks at his mother in a last-ditch attempt, but he knows it’s useless. Denise has that glint in her eyes that she gets when she sees the opening she needs, and this is it – both Kevin and Joe are on board, and Nick can’t do this without them. _Won’t_ do this without them.

She opens her mouth to speak, and Nick knows this is going to be more than three months. His mother has wanted to end the whole venture ever since his diagnosis, and in that moment, he knows that he’ll never see the inside of a recording studio again.

"We're done," Denise says, and somewhere in the background of the firmament, the universe splits in two.

*

Of course, they weren’t done. Nick sweet-talked Joe into waking up at four in the morning and downing a full pot of black coffee with him, fortifying themselves with caffeine until they were visibly and audibly buzzing, and Nick’s eyes were so bright with energy that Denise had no choice but to give in and let Nick and his brothers go into the city to fulfill the commitment for their recording session. They never did take that break, and when Columbia dropped them a year later, Hollywood Records was there, holding the golden ticket to their dreams.

Well, that’s what happened in our universe, anyway.

*

Nick was going to record in LA, but Joe's already recording in LA, and after the tour – after Demi and Courtney and having to vigorously defend each other to whatever reporter happens to think their question about the Jonas Brothers' love lives hasn't been asked already – Nick's sick to death of looking at Joe and he's pretty sure the reverse is equally true. Somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, Joe had started slamming doors and Nick had begun wearing his headphones every hour he wasn't on stage, and they finished out the North American leg of the tour exchanging requests for the salt over hotel dining tables.

Nashville is hot and sticky, which is one of the main reasons Nick will never become a country music superstar, and John Fields desperately and obviously wants to be back in Minneapolis. Nick's played "Continuous Loop" seven different times now, and neither of them are happy with the results. He cringes when he goes flat at the bridge, voice veering out of his register and out of his control.

His throat is raw and he's tired and his shirt is damp with sweat, and it's worse than any session he's ever had (with the notable exception of that time the toilet on the recording bus stopped working after they got dinner at Chipotle). He lets his guitar fall out of his grip and away from his body, pulling against his shoulders like an anchor.

"It sucks," he says. "I don't know how to fix it."

John shrugs, because Nick is just another figure in a long line of musicians who have streamed in and out of his life. "We'll figure it out."

"It just sounds all wrong." Nick shifts his weight from one foot to the other, listening to the floorboards creak beneath him. "It's not what it was back in Texas. This sounded _right_ in Texas, and something's gone. It's _gone."_

"Can I be honest with you?"

"Yeah."

"You sound like you don't care," John says flatly, pulling his baseball cap low over his eyes. "There's no life behind it."

Nick sighs, because John is always right, and thinks about how he felt when he wrote the song. He remembers the wood-paneled walls of the basement studio at his house in Dallas, the sound of his mother banging pots together upstairs and Frankie throwing his Xbox controller against the wall in vague, dulled frustration. He sees Kevin leaning against the arm of the couch, tapping away at his Blackberry, and Joe is next to him, writing down the lyrics that Nick's throwing out. Nick will make fun of Joe's spelling later, vowing to give all his new songs multisyllabic titles, and Joe will stick his tongue out before asking how many "c"s are in "circuit."

Nick doesn't know why they started falling apart -- Mom says it's all part of growing up and becoming their own people, that he and Joe won't always be as close as they were growing up and they have to start leading separate lives sometime and Kevin got _married_ , honey, these things are going to happen sooner or later -- but he's pretty sure it sucks out loud. He doesn't think Joe realizes that he's really Nick's only friend, because ex-girlfriends and people who technically work for you don't count; Joe goes to hipster church with girls in gladiator sandals, now, and Nick's not really all that invited.

Nick can’t help it that the gossip rags had decided to make a huge deal out of the fact that he’d gotten pizza once – exactly _once_ – with Courtney while they were stopped in Buffalo. She’s a nice girl, yeah, and she’s pretty, but there’s absolutely nothing there, and Nick really just needed a break from the nonstop drama festival that Demi Lovato was ringleading back on the tour buses. It’s not _his_ fault that Joe decided to date his best friend, and it’s not _his_ fault that said best friend ended up being crazycakes once in a relationship, and it’s _definitely_ not _his_ fault that the two of them broke up and they had to spend the whole rest of the year being on tour with someone who hated them.

(“What did _I_ do?” Nick had asked Demi once, frustrated and unable to believe that this was the same girl they’d recorded with two years earlier.

“You didn’t stop him,” she’d replied, climbing back onto her own bus and slamming the door.)

So yeah, Nick had jumped at the chance to get out of the line of fire, and Courtney knows the game by now. She’d tried to explain that Demi was hurt and maybe wasn’t processing things rationally, and Nick was all ready to walk out of the pizza place and extend the olive branch on behalf of his brother when they were assaulted by paparazzi flashes, and, well.

“Demi just said that Joe’s emotionally crippled,” one of them had shouted. “Anything to say, Nick?”

He’d rolled his eyes. “No comment,” he’d yelled back, leading Courtney over to the car.

Apparently, everyone had been hoping for something a bit more incisive than “no comment,” and even though Joe professed to understand that Nick had just been taken by surprise, he’d started to withdraw more and more.

When Zack Taylor took to writing about how Nick was too busy scoring dates with older women to defend his brother, Joe started requesting separate hotel rooms, and it was all downhill from there.

Nick finishes up the session with the remaining patience he has left and takes his hired car back to his hotel, slipping through the service entrance and avoiding the crowds outside. That isn’t Nick, usually, because he was raised to be appreciative of what he has and to give back to the fans as much as he can, but he’s so – _fucking_ ¬ – exhausted that he doesn’t think he could trust himself to smile. And they _really_ can’t afford any bad publicity right now.

His room is air-conditioned and sterile, and he throws his bag down on the king-size bed before flopping down alongside it. He needs to rest tonight, because he can’t afford to have another session like today. This record has to be perfect, he knows, because he can’t let another album flop as badly as his last two did. And judging by how he and his brothers are getting along lately, the chances of there being another Jonas Brothers album are slim to none, at this point.

He wriggles his phone out of his pocket and calls Joe, more out of habit than anything else.

The line clicks on. “Is this important? Because I’m kind of in the middle of something here.”

Nick checks his watch – it’s about 5:30 p.m. in LA, and Joe might still be at the studio, trying to be Dude Lady Gaga or whatever the hell it is he’s doing in there. More than likely, though, he’s cooking dinner, and he’s pissed that Nick’s interrupted an important seasoning session. Or something.

He yawns. “Just wanted to say hi. We haven’t talked in a few days.”

“Because I’m busy, and you’re busy,” Joe says brusquely. “Get anything done today?”

“Tried to lay down ‘Continuous Loop,’ but we weren’t feeling it,” Nick replies. He sees Joe in his mind’s eye, standing in the kitchen, cooking a meal for all his cool hipster friends. “You?”

“The usual. Hey, can we pick this up later? Like I said, I’ve got a thing happening.” Joe sounds distant, undercurrent of anger that’s been there for the last two months bubbling to the surface, and the casual cruelty makes Nick spiteful.

“Sure, man. Just pondering the demise of our collective musical careers,” he says, listening for the sharp intake of breath he’s guaranteed to get out of Joe whenever he’s unexpectedly snide. He’s rewarded quickly.

"Whatever," Joe answers, and hangs up.

Nick doesn’t even bother staring at his phone in open-lipped shock; he thumbs the Lock key and throws it across the room, not really caring if it shatters into a million pieces. He has two other phones, and if someone dies or whatever, they can damn well call Reception to let him know about it.

He bunches the pillow up underneath his head, cold cotton against his hot cheeks, and he thinks about the road that lies ahead of him.

Finish this album, definitely. Go on tour for it, maybe. Finish up filming the third season of the TV show – his legal team’s working on getting him out of that one, thank God. And after that? No idea. Joe’s barely speaking to him and Kevin’s maybe a week away from announcing that Danielle’s pregnant and it turns out that Frankie has zero musical talent whatsoever, and he knows that no amount of prodding and pleading from their production team will get them into the studio to finish their hundreds of unfinished tracks if they don’t want to do it. Nick will try to do it himself and fail miserably, and their contract with Hollywood will expire and Nick will be the oldest eighteen-year-old in the world, washed up and wrung out before most kids his age have even finished their first year of college.

But right now, in this heartbreakingly blank hotel room, Nick can’t bring himself to care; he’s too tired, and he _hates_ how tired he's become.

Yeah, most kids are finishing up their spring semesters right now. They’re worried about getting summer jobs, not how they’re going to finish out a multimillion-dollar recording contract without defaulting on some clause or other. They can get a cup of freaking coffee without causing all hell to break loose. They can fight with their parents and not worry about their fathers leaking it to _People_ as an example of how unfocused and juvenile they are. And if their brothers stop speaking to them, they don’t have to deal with thousands of internet messages about how they should just kiss and make up.

Must be nice, he thinks.

"I wish I was normal," he mutters, rolling over and waiting for sleep.

*

When Nick wakes up, Elvis is barking somewhere in the distance, and contrary to what he thought last night, this is precisely when being a spoiled rock star comes in handy.

"ROB," he bellows, not bothering to lift his face out of the pillow. "ELVIS NEEDS TO GO OUT."

He's planning on going back to sleep when someone kicks him sharply and tells him to shut the fuck up.

"You shut the fuck up," Nick grumbles to the faceless voice he assumes is his own conscience, and he's ready to write the kick off as a figment of his imagination when that same someone grabs his shoulder and pushes him sideways.

"I told you to shut the fuck up first," Joe says, knocking Nick on the forehead with the heel of his hand, and that's when Nick sits straight up in bed and realizes that something has gone terribly awry during the night.

His hotel room in Nashville had been large and airy, sheer curtains bracketing wide windows that overlooked the greenery below; this room is small and cramped and dark with high, north-facing windows, and oh, yeah, _Joe_ is in bed next to him, brushing long waves of black hair out of his face. He looks totally nonplussed.

"Mom's not going to let your dog out for you," he announces, kicking the covers off. "Just go walk Elvis and I'll make some pancakes or something. I need to be at work by ten anyway."

_Work?_ Nick thinks to himself, watching Joe as he pushes himself out of bed and pads over to the window. He pulls up the shade, and -- _oh my God._

The tree outside the window is old and gnarled, with a plank nailed between two of the forked branches, just below the sill. About five feet above the sash lie the ruins of an old treehouse, built with scrap firewood collected from neighborhood backyards, and the flowers that grow at its base are constantly trampled by beaten-in Converse One-Stars. It's the kind of tree that lends itself to adventures that end in broken bones and violent bruises.

Joe fell out of that tree when he was ten years old and broke his wrist.

It's the tree that grows outside the bedroom he and Joe shared back when they lived in a small house in Wyckoff, New Jersey.

*

"You look pale," Joe offers from across a table full of pancakes, and Nick can only nod dumbly in response.

The kitchen hasn’t changed much – they’ve still got the same table and chairs, same freestanding pantry filled with sugar-free treats. His mother – his _mom,_ for God’s sake, looking tired but happy in old pajama pants and a pink tank top – is doing laundry in the corner, pulling plaid shirt upon plaid shirt from the washer and folding them up before placing them in the laundry basket. She sips at a cup of coffee before turning around and examining Nick with a critical, motherly eye.

“You _do_ look pale, Nicholas,” she proclaims. “Did you – “

“ – one-twenty,” Nick interrupts, because even in Bizarro-Land, he knows exactly what his mother’s going to say.

He’s the same age that he is now, as are Joe and Frankie and Kevin; Joe’s hair is still longer and straight, and Kevin’s wearing his glasses instead of his contacts, but they all look otherwise the same as they did when Nick got on the plane to Nashville last week. From what he can gather, Kevin is outside watering the plants at their mother’s behest, Frankie is playing video games in his room, and their father is at Eastern Christian this Saturday morning, mediating parent-teacher conferences and meeting with parishioners.

_Eastern Christian._ Nick had done a double-take when he saw the three diplomas hanging in identical frames on the wall of the stairwell, proclaiming that each of the three eldest Jonas brothers (no capital letter, this time) had completed high school and was entitled to all the rights, responsibilities, and privileges of being a high school graduate. Nick wracked his brain to come up with a scenario that would explain it – sure, they all finished high school, but it was fake Disney high school and even Joe made it out with a 4.0 GPA – but he couldn’t think of anything. Why is he in Jersey, why is Joe heading to work, and why is his mother doing her own laundry?

It was only when Nick examined the walls of their home more closely that it occurred to him. The stairwell, the kitchen, the dining room – all are filled with plaques and trophies attesting to Kevin’s prowess with the pole vault and the bowling ball, proclaiming Joe to be one of New Jersey’s promising young filmmakers, showing Frankie to be a gifted left tackle. And Nick – Nick has award after award displayed on the wall, for speech and for debate and for baseball and for academics and for everything under the sun.

But there are no gold records. No platinum records. No American Music Awards, no Kids’ Choice Awards, and that’s when it all falls into place.

_This is my world if we never got famous,_ Nick thought to himself before staggering into the kitchen as if on autopilot and opening the back door for a golden retriever just a bit more worse for the wear than his own Elvis.

He knows that he didn’t hit his head, and he’s pretty sure that he didn’t die in his sleep, and he doubts that aliens would abduct him only to show him something this mundane. That leaves parallel universes, and while Nick’s pleased that he was able to figure that out within half an hour of waking up on the other side of the multiverse, he’s not quite sure a) how it happened, b) how he’s supposed to get back, and c) why this is even happening to him in the first place.

Somewhere, somehow, this is probably Joe’s fault.

Denise clucks her tongue, snapping Nick out of his daze. “The number’s okay, but I want you to be careful today. You haven’t been yourself since you got home from Cambridge.”

_Cambridge?_

Joe swallows a bite of whole-wheat pancake. “It’s the adjustment from dorm food to home cooking, Moms. You should see the slop they try to feed the freshies. For as much as Harvard costs, you’d think they’d get better food, but – ”

_Okay,_ Nick thinks, _this is just about IT._

“I go to _what?”_ he asks disbelievingly.

Joe rolls his eyes. “You don’t have to rub it in, dude. We all know you go to Harvard. You know, big school, lots of statues, more money than Oprah?”

Nick’s brain is working overtime, trying to piece this together. He must have just finished his freshman year of college, okay, so he’s home for the summer and he goes to _Harvard_ , apparently, and what on Earth does he _study?_

“Ahahaha,” he covers. “Sorry. You know, just, um, still sort of hard to believe.”

And he runs up the stairs to his bedroom, praying to God that he was stupid enough to set up a public Facebook page.

*

Luckily for Nick, he’s _exactly_ that stupid, and he learns that this version of himself is majoring in Government and belongs to the Debate Society. He lives in someplace called Weld South, and his interests are listed as “public infrastructure, Paul Krugman’s less whacked-out theories, the self-awareness that comes with being a former child performer, and Elvis Costello.”

Nick stares at the screen for a moment, absorbing the Favorite Books ( _White Noise; Guns, Germs, and Steel; What’s the Matter With Kansas_ ) and the profile picture (a mock Polaroid of himself sitting on a bench in a park, cross-legged and looking down at his laptop), and can’t believe what he’s seeing.

“I am the most pretentious bastard in the world,” he breathes, clicking over to his list of friends and opening up Joe’s page.

His older brother is, unsurprisingly, a rising senior at Emerson College in downtown Boston, majoring in cinematography. He seems to spend most of his time posting YouTube videos of surprised dogs to Nick’s profile and taking half-artsy photographs of his friends (Nick suspects his own profile photo is Joe’s work). Joe’s interests apparently include “disliking Robert Altman” and “Tribe hummus,” and Nick is relieved that food still takes up enough of Joe’s headspace to warrant a mention.

Nick sits back and surveys the room.

His half is reasonably tidy, although the wrinkles of his comforter look amateurish after years of hotels and maids and housekeepers. His guitar -- the old Fender with chips on the plating -- is propped up against his nightstand, along with a pile of books. Nick scans the titles: _A People's History of the United States, The Assault on Reason, God's Politics, The Wrecking Crew._ He's never heard of any of them, but his other self is apparently reading them all simultaneously and -- judging by the bent spines -- not for the first time. He remembers the posters, at least, Elvis Costello and Johnny Cash staring down at him from high up on the walls, and it looks like he still kicks his shoes under the bed when he takes them off.

Joe's half of the room looks as if the cast of _Rent_ threw up all over it, and Nick suspects that the reason he woke up with Joe sharing his bed is that Joe can’t actually find his own. It seems to be the base of a giant pile of clothing, with a delicately balanced stack of DVDs crowning the summit. There’s a life-size cutout of James Bond in there somewhere – Nick can tell by the craggy eyes of Daniel Craig, peeking out from underneath a sweater he thinks must have once been Kevin’s – and at least fifteen books are scattered around the floor in various stages of completion. Nick thinks that _Easy Riders, Raging Bulls_ might be a good read if Joe cleans the dried marinara sauce off of the dust jacket.

“Before you say anything,” Joe says from the doorway, “I just want to remind you that you’ve been home for three days and I’ve been home for two weeks. I’ve had way more time to make a mess.”

Nick shakes his head, more at this weird concept of _home_ than anything else. “And somehow, you’ve had time to cultivate science experiments?” He motions to the sauce splattered across the book that he noticed earlier.

Joe shrugs, throwing himself across the room and onto Nick’s bed. He bounces a few times and then sits up. “We don’t really do science at Emerson. Maybe this is the only chance I have to explore my full potential.” He pauses. “Or, you know, something like that.”

Nick sits down next to him and takes the blessed silence as opportunity to think about what little he knows about colleges. He knows that everyone lives in dorms to start off, and people complain about morning classes, and everyone has to eat cafeteria food, and then they all go out and drink a lot? Most of the people he knows who have been to college went to tiny Christian schools or studied the ministry, so he’s not totally clear on the subject. Most of his knowledge seems to come from old episodes of _Saved by the Bell_ and Rob Hoffman, and he doesn’t think either is the best source of information.

JT went to Berklee College of Music, Nick knows, and Kevin had wanted to go there, too, at least until they were able to afford Louis Vuitton guitars for him and learning the technical aspects of their craft suddenly seemed less important. One of the dads at their church growing up had gone to Boston College, and he wore maroon sweatshirts with eagles on them _everywhere._ Garbo had spent a year at Seton Hall before joining up, and he thinks a few of the guys who helped out with stage construction on the last tour might have gone to SMU. And beyond that, Nick hits a dead end.

Except somehow, in a parallel universe, he’s ended up at Harvard and should really be an expert on this. Nick _hates_ not being an expert on things, and he vows to study as many Wikipedia articles as he can get his hands on once Joe leaves for – what’s his job, again?

“What are you going to do at work today?” he says cautiously.

Joe laughs. “Ideally? Finish that book on Diane Arbus before the library puts a price on my head. In reality? Get splashed by annoying children and develop a terrible sunburn.”

Nick breathes a sigh of relief. Joe as a lifeguard isn’t that hard to imagine. “Yeah, I bet you could avoid the sunburn if you put on sunscreen.”

Joe rolls his eyes. “Trust me when I say that there is nothing creepier than a twenty-one-year-old dude asking second-graders if they can do his back. Unless you want to come with?” He waggles his eyebrows, and it’s so _Joe_ that Nick bursts into laughter.

“I think I’ll pass,” he says, breezing out of the room.

*

Amazingly, Nick still drives a vintage Mustang. Not-so-amazingly, this one looks like he pieced it together from crap he found underneath the sink.

“I can’t believe this thing runs,” he says to himself, running his hand along the bare space where chrome plating should be. “It looks like it’s going to fall apart any second now.”

“That’s because it is,” his mother interjects, carrying a basketful of laundry past him. “Don’t even _think_ of taking that thing on the highway again, Nicholas, I was worried _sick._ Help me with the clothesline?”

He knows that this version of his family doesn’t own a dryer because the electricity is prohibitively expensive, but he also knows that his mother likes the scent of laundry dried in the open air. He follows her across the lawn and spins the clothesline, fumbling around for the bucket of clothespins he thinks must still be hanging on the edge.

They’re exactly where they’re supposed to be, and Nick smiles as his mother hands him a towel.

“So what are you up to today, sweetie?” Denise asks, plucking a clothespin from between her teeth. “When’s Joe working until?”

“I think he said six,” Nick replies. “I don’t know. I might write a song or something, maybe.”

His mother bursts out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” he asks, pushing his hair off his forehead.

Denise smiles. “Oh, honey, you haven’t said anything like that in years! It’s always, _I have to read this_ and _I have to study that._ I hope you do write something. It’ll be lovely to hear you play again.”

Nick really did think he could handle anything, but a world where he doesn’t live and breathe music? That’s a little tough to take. He tries to think about what he would have done if they hadn’t made it anywhere, but he can’t see himself just throwing down the guitar and walking away – it’s all too important, too vital to his continued existence.

But maybe that’s not how his thirteen-year-old self saw it, once it was all stripped away.

“Sure,” he says hollowly, watching the cars make their way down the street.

*

He’s sitting in the living room watching the news when his father gets home, and he’s startled when Kevin Sr. hands him a looseleaf notebook bursting with paper.

“There’s nothing open in Christie’s regional office, but both Lautenberg and Menendez are looking for summer interns in their North Jersey divisions,” he says without introduction. “The Appellate Division of Bergen Superior needs pages, but most of the positions available are down in Trenton, and your mother won’t go for that.”

Nick blinks. “Hi, Dad.”

“I’m putting in a call to Uncle Garth down in Washington,” Kevin Sr. continues, “to see what he can rustle up. Maybe something at a lobbying firm in the city, if you want to ride in with your brother every day. Or remember the Irish family that lived next door when I was at Nazarene? I think I’ve got their number somewhere, the father was someone big in the AFL-CIO. Denise! Honey, I need my Rolodex.”

Nick shakes his head as his father leaves the room. He looks at a few of the pages in the notebook before dropping it on the coffee table and flipping the TV to some Discovery Networks program about parasites.

Maybe he’ll go see Joe at the pool after all.

*

“NO RUNNING,” Joe yells through his megaphone, and it’s so stereotypical – red shorts, towel around his neck, whistle at the ready – that Nick thinks this would make a great scene for _JONAS_ , if he can’t get out of filming the third season.

The guilty party slows down and sticks her tongue out at Joe before waddling away towards the ice-cream stand.

“I feel like any desire I had to work with children has been brutally murdered by six consecutive summers of this,” Joe says dryly, handing Nick a Diet Coke from the cooler at his feet. “Thank your lucky stars that you’re majoring in something Dad finds worthwhile and aren’t trapped babysitting waterlogged lunatics all day.”

Nick pops open his soda and sits down in the camp chair next to Joe. “Film’s useful,” he says, because in his world, it is. In his world, Kevin Sr. would pass out with joy if Joe bothered to apply himself to something with even the remotest academic interest. “You can’t make movies if you don’t study them first.”

Joe snorts. “He’s still mad that I didn’t major in business like Kevin. And look how far that got him, you know?”

Nick nods, because while he’s sure this version of him _does_ know, he’s only managed to put together bits and pieces of what Kevin actually _does_ besides water the plants and, apparently, disappoint their father. “Yeah.”

“OKAY, SERIOUSLY, NO RUNNING.” Joe sighs. “Anyway, you know how I feel about that. It’s just… I could be spending the summer working on a screenplay or interning on a set in LA, you know? And I’m not expecting Mom and Dad to pay for it – God, no. Despite what Dad thinks, I’m not _that_ selfish. But there are scholarships, and I’ve got some money saved up, but they’d never even let me get on the plane. If I’m not going to do something _worthwhile_ , he says, I might as well just stay home and do the same stupid job I’ve been doing every summer since I was sixteen.”

Kevin’s always been the cheerful, grown-up one, and Nick’s always been everyone’s favorite. Frankie is the self-aware spare, and Joe – well, Joe’s his mother’s son and always has been. Nick’s seen the glances Joe shoots at their father in business meetings, especially when he knocks down Joe’s ideas, and he’s been in the room for some truly epic lectures on the sort of messages Joe’s behavior sends. It’s tapered off some, now that Joe’s grown up and moved out, but their relationship isn’t any better, honestly. What was a hot conflict has turned into a cold war, with Joe camped out in Silverlake and Nick stuck in the DMZ.

Evidently, things aren’t all that different here. Money really can buy some things, Nick thinks, and compliance and indifference are among them.

“I’m just saying that Dad’s super-lucky that Zach Braff managed to make something of himself despite being stuck in New Jersey forever,” Joe’s continuing. “Because otherwise, he’d have a real problem on his hands.” He turns to Nick and smiles. “And hey, someone’s got to make sure you see the sunlight during the daytime, right?”

It’s something Nick’s heard from his Joe a million times before, and he smiles faintly. “Yeah, you’ve got to make sure I don’t turn into a vampire.”

“There’s a joke in there about blood sugar, but I’m too lazy to make it.”

Nick’s grin grows wider, and only fades incrementally when he takes a beach ball to the face moments later.

*  
He’d ridden his bike down to the pool – Nick’s not ready to admit that he has no idea where the keys to his car even _are_ – and he takes off for home when he feels his scalp starting to burn beneath the mid-afternoon sun. He stops at a convenience store to refill his bottle of water, but he finds himself inevitably drawn to the rack of magazines at the back.

Miley still rules the covers – Nick wonders what a Miley Cyrus album without copious references to hating a Jonas Brother sounds like, anyway – and Justin Bieber is still A Thing in this universe. The kids from _Twilight_ take up most of the page, which is normal, but Selena’s just a blurry photograph down by the barcode and Demi is conspicuously absent altogether.

_Of course,_ Nick thinks. _Camp Rock never happened. I wonder if Joe still had his Asian-lady mullet, though._

He flips through the magazine, desperately hoping that he goes unnoticed – he’s not famous, but he’s still an eighteen-year-old dude looking through _Tiger Beat_ – and finds out that _Hannah Montana_ is going into its fifth season and Demi has the _Wizards of Waverly Place_ role currently occupied by Jen Stone.

He picks up another magazine and finds more of the same – Miley’s last two albums in this universe were cookie-cutter candy pop that sold well with nine-year-olds and no one else, and her crossover appeal is zilch. He wonders how insane that’s got to be making her, and no sooner does he think the word “insane” than Taylor Swift pops up in the middle of _J-14_ with an entire album of songs about how the kid from _Glee_ dumped her via text message.

“Wow, Taylor, maybe it really is just you,” Nick murmurs, noting that Chelsea’s got a pretty successful solo career going on over at Columbia, and Nicole’s on a CBS sitcom with Alan Thicke. David Henrie still can’t be bothered to wear shirts, Disney’s still trying to make Debby Ryan happen, Taylor Momsen got fired from _Gossip Girl,_ and the void he and his brothers have left in teen-pop culture seems to have been filled by Metro Station. Nick pauses for a moment to consider how ridiculous that actually is, and puts the magazine back where he found it.

He buys _Newsweek_ so the clerk doesn’t accuse him of shoplifting and is bizarrely relieved to find out that the rest of the world is exactly the same.

He spends his bike ride home trying to convince himself that he’s not self-absorbed enough to believe that the existence of the Jonas Brothers as a media phenomenon would actually affect world affairs. By the time he parks his Schwinn in the garage, he’s grudgingly admitted that he’s _exactly_ that self-absorbed, and he asks his mom if she needs help with the lawn as penance.

The yard is much bigger than he remembers, and by the time he’s finished, he thinks he’s done enough karmic rebalancing to last a lifetime.

*

Nick is sitting cross-legged on his bed after dinner, plucking away at his hopelessly out-of-tune guitar, when Joe bursts into the room.

“Huh,” he says, glancing at the guitar. “Weird. Anyway, there’s a party down in Plainfield tonight, if you want to go. Guy who knows a guy who knows a place, the usual. You in?”

This is, in theory, what Nick wants; he wants to be a normal kid who can show up at backyard parties without a mob scene breaking out, who can drink a few beers without causing an international crisis. He wants to say, “Yeah,” wants to ride shotgun in Joe’s hideous truck, wants to eat nachos and talk to cute girls and sneak into the house well past curfew, praying the branches of the tree outside don’t give out.

At least, it’s what he _should_ want.

He shakes his head slowly. “Nah,” he says instead. “I’m good here.”

Because the truth is that Nick Jonas can never be normal, not even in a universe where he’s never been anything but. Nick doesn’t know how to talk to people his own age, because he missed out on those crucial developmental years and the only girls he ever seems to talk to these days are the ones who are _thisclose_ to passing out with excitement in front of him. He knows what will happen if he goes with Joe; he’ll be horrifyingly awkward the whole time, lurking in the corner antisocially while Joe makes the party all about him. He’ll get grumpier and grumpier until he’s worked himself into an epic sulk, and Joe will wonder what the hell is wrong with him before depositing him back home and heading back out to “get a snack” with some cute girl who wonders if all Harvard kids are socially retarded or something. Nick will be grouchy and miserable and unable to sleep until Joe comes back smelling of knockoff Calvin Klein Obsession, and that’ll be several hours wasted that Nick could have spent figuring out how to wake up in his depressing Nashville hotel room instead.

Joe shrugs. “Okay,” he replies, throwing himself down on the bed next to Nick. His Joe is buff and brawny from two-hour workouts on Muscle Beach with a trainer who looks like an overstuffed sausage casing; he drinks protein shakes and loads up on carbohydrates and spends too much time at the gym out of sheer boredom. This Joe is slimmer, with leaner muscles and the hungry, vaguely sallow look of someone who spends most of his time from September to May in a windowless editing room. “Want to watch something? I got the first season of _Community_ off Netflix.”

Nick blinks. “You’re not going?”

“Dude, come on,” Joe replies, smiling in a blinding, open way that Nick hasn’t seen in months. _Years,_ maybe. “I lived twenty minutes away from you all year and barely saw you once a week. We need Bro Time, Nicholas. You know what happens when we don’t get Bro Time.”

“You get needy and clingy?” Nick guesses, and wishes he could take it back immediately. Joe laughs anyway.

“So needy and so clingy,” he agrees. “Come on. Not that I’m not stupid-happy to see the guitar out, but stop working on something for five seconds and play with me.” He waggles his eyebrows, and Nick dissolves into giggles.

It feels good, and even though this isn’t _his_ Joe, he realizes just how much he misses his older brother.

*

Kevin wanders in partway through the second disc, looking dejected. Nick and Joe are sprawled across Nick’s bed, feet knocking together, so Kevin sits on the floor in front of the television and sighs.

Nick takes the hint and hits pause on the remote.

“On a scale of one to ten, how crazy was this one?” Joe asks, and Nick wonders what he’s talking about.

Kevin’s shoulders slump. “She was, like, a fourteen. First, she says that I don’t look anything like my picture, and seriously, I took it _two weeks ago_ , and so what if I wasn’t wearing my glasses? My glasses make me look cool, okay? And her picture was at least six months old and her hair’s all weird and ratty now. So we go to that place I like down by the water, and she snits at me that they don’t have the appetizers that she likes, so I leave – _after_ paying for three of her drinks, mind you – and we end up at some stupid Applebees on Staten Island because she says she knows the bartender there. So after sitting on the freaking ferry and suffering through her screaming in my ear about how much she hates her mother, she gives me this _look_ when I ask for ranch dressing on the side of my sandwich. Apparently, she doesn’t _do_ guys who are ‘high-maintenance,’ and she gets up and leaves and sticks me with the bill,” he finishes, looking more miserable by the second. “I’m going to leave the nastiest message right on her profile where _everyone_ can see it. I hope _no one_ picks her on QuickMatch ever again.”

Nick coughs. “I understood maybe ten words of that.”

“I liked the girl you went out with last week,” Joe comments. “So what if she smelled weird? People all have these unique scents, you know.”

“You spend too much time with art students and homeless people,” Kevin replies scathingly. “Maybe it’s okay with _you_ if I die unhappy and alone, but _I’m_ going to try and do something about it, okay?”

“Kevin.” Joe throws a pillow at him. “You’re on Match. You’re on OKCupid. You’re on eHarmony. You’re on Chemistry. And I think Mom even signed you up for JDate because of your hair. At some point, you just need to accept that online dating isn’t really your thing.”

“It’s everyone’s thing,” Kevin replies sulkily. “It’s neater than meeting at a club or a speakeasy or, you know, wherever it is people my age hang out.”

“Speakeasies.” Joe looks at Nick, eyes full of mirth. “Nicholas, old chap, I think I’ve just discovered why Kevin’s a failure at online dating. It’s because he’s secretly from 1927, and the internet hasn’t been invented yet.”

“Shut up,” Kevin retorts. “At least I’m trying. You _don’t_ try, and that’s why I’ve spent the past year and a half trying to convince Mom and Dad that you’re not gay, you’re just really busy.”

“But I _am_ gay,” Joe replies, and Nick thanks all the angels and the seraphim that he’s not drinking anything, because he would have choked on it. “I tried to tell them that! But Mom thinks I was kidding and Dad blocked it out.”

Kevin shakes his head. “They’re not going to get on board with that for a long, long, _long_ time. Hey,” he says, turning to Nick, “you don’t look so good.”

Nick gulps. “I – I – maybe I spent too much time in the sun today.”

Of course, that’s not really the case. He’s trying to figure out how much of this parallel universe bleeds into his own, because there’s _no way_ his Joe is gay. Like, he dates _girls_ , okay, and then they get _really mad_ at him and write _songs_ about it and _cause nuclear fallout_ over it. His brother jumps from girl to girl like he’s an addict, never really settling on one, and it’s not _Joe’s_ fault that all his girlfriends have been crazy. He’s never really all that happy once he’s in a confirmed, long-term relationship; Nick remembers how gleeful and free he was after the split with Demi, how he was so excited to go to all those Lakers games with Martin –

_Oh._

Nick supposes that this is as close as he’ll ever get to actually having an anvil dropped directly on his head.

“See, Nick really is too busy to date,” Joe’s saying in the background. “You should have seen him after his last debate competition, Kev. All these girls from Princeton and Brown were trying to give him their numbers, and he was all, ‘Oh, sorry, I’m just too booked up right now.’ Like, seriously hot girls! With seriously hot brains! But no, Nick has to _study._ And that is why you will both die alone,” Joe finishes, “and I will happily live out my days in Key West with a man called Gustav who speaks limited English but who has a tremendous head of hair.”

Kevin blinks. “Why do I get the feeling that you’ve given that scenario an awful lot of thought?”

“Some of us plan for the future, Kev,” Joe says. “Are you going to join us, or are you leaving? Because you’re blocking the TV.”

Kevin gets up, grumbling about warning Frankie away from Joe and his deviant ways, and leaves the room.

Joe fumbles for the remote and hits Play again, and they’re quiet through the end of the disc but for their shared snickering. Nick misses this so much – casually hanging out with Joe, watching movies together and enjoying each other’s presence. He wonders what he and this Joe have that doesn’t exist anymore in his own universe – less stress, maybe. Definitely.

The title menu starts to play on repeat and Nick can feel himself dozing off, and he’s idly wondering if he’ll wake up in his own world when Joe leans over and says, “Hey, Nicky. Wanna make out?”

To say that Nick jerks upright with a quickness would be an understatement. _“What?”_

Joe shrugs, easy roll of his shoulders beneath his t-shirt. “I’m bored, it’s dark, everyone’s asleep. It’s not like we’re going to get caught or anything.” He sits up and leans in closer, smirking. “Although I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that no one around here is going to believe me when I say that you’re my friend Nicklaus, here on exchange from Germany. I think that was a one-time excuse.”

Joe’s breath is hot and his eyes are dark, and all Nick can think to say is, “You sure do like Teutonic men.”

Joe falls back on the bed laughing at that remark, giving Nick a chance to catch up as best as he can. Okay. So. Apparently, in this universe, he sometimes makes out with his brother, who is now gay, and who is really into German dudes? No, Nick, that’s not the point. Like, Joe’s an attractive guy and all, but Nick’s never thought about him like that.

Much.

Okay, fine. So sometimes, when Nick’s between girlfriends and he’s running low on jerk-off material, he lets his mind wander back to being fourteen and obsessed with his older brother, the boy who knew everything and who would do anything just to make Nick smile. He remembers being more wrapped up in Joe than he was in the music, even, and the love he felt for Joe sometimes bled over the lines that should have delineated him as his brother and nothing more. He sometimes lets himself think about the clean lines of Joe’s smile and the dark waves of his hair, the powerful muscles, the full lips…

But it’s only when he can’t think of anything else, and he’d never act on it, because Joe is his _brother._ His _brother,_ who has finished laughing and who is looking rather impatient against the pillows of Nick’s bed.

“Come here,” Joe says, and Nick knows that this is his chance to get away; this is where he should be saying that he has a headache or that he’s not feeling great or maybe they can pick this up tomorrow, at which point Nick should be stowed safely away in his own universe, where his own Joe is currently preoccupied with disliking him immensely. He should be getting up and leaving, and who cares if Joe thinks it’s weird, because his own Joe is barely speaking to him and… well, Nick’s not really sure how he feels about having _both_ Joes mad at him, but if that’s what it takes, he should be doing it. This is his chance to say no.

“Okay,” he says instead, scooting back on the bed and lying down next to his brother. When push comes to shove, Nick just can’t take the idea of _both_ Joes hating him.

Joe smiles. “Excellent,” he says, voice low and promising – Nick doesn’t know _what_ it’s promising, exactly, but he hopes it’s good – and he swings one leg over Nick’s hips, straddling him.

_Whatever happens, it’s better than him getting pissed off,_ Nick says to himself, licking his lips nervously as Joe leans down and presses their mouths together.

Nick knows that his Joe must be a decent kisser, what with all the girls he’s been with, and Nick thinks that he’s no slouch himself – but this Joe is really, _really_ good. He must sense how keyed-up and apprehensive Nick is, because he goes slow to start; quick brushes of lips, his hands playing with the curls at the nape of Nick’s neck. Nick doesn’t trust himself to let go of his death grip on the sheets, and he knows that his body is stiff as a board underneath Joe’s. Joe doesn’t seem to mind, though; he smiles against Nick’s mouth and nips gently at his lower lip, causing Nick to pull back and cry out.

“What, did you wake up on the fifteen-year-old side of the bed this morning?” Joe asks quietly, tilting Nick’s head up to face him. “You’re so tense, seriously. You okay?”

Nick nods, because this is Joe and in this universe, anyway, Joe would never do anything to hurt him. Joe smiles and angles Nick’s mouth where he wants it, and his mouth is wet and hot and oh.

He still doesn’t have any idea how they started doing this, but Joe’s tongue is pressing against his teeth now and he’s doing something with his fingers against Nick’s shoulder blades and wow, Nick certainly knows why they _keep_ doing this. He lets his fists uncurl slowly as Joe works his mouth, his tongue agile and quick, and Nick tentatively opens up and starts kissing back.

“Fucking _finally,_ ” Joe mutters against his lips, his hands going firm against Nick’s back as he presses them even closer. Nick can feel the growing hardness in Joe’s jeans, and when he works up the courage to slide his hand against Joe’s thigh, Joe grinds against him in response.

Nick can totally blame everything that happens after that on his own dick’s inability to behave itself.

The kiss becomes hard and messy, Nick’s teeth ramming into Joe’s lips and Joe’s hand wrenched in Nick’s hair, and not once in what he likes to think of as his long and illustrious career of wooing girls has Nick ever _once_ kissed anyone like this. Joe drops down so they’re chest-to-chest, no room between them, and the thought of being held down like this – being _restrained_ – makes Nick kiss back harder than ever.

Joe clamps his thighs around Nick’s hips and rears back, stripping off his t-shirt, and that’s when Nick comes crashing back to himself and realizes that the person he’s having this totally hot makeout session with is not only a _guy._ He’s his _brother._

He wonders just how far he’s fallen from grace when that realization doesn’t make him jump off the bed and scamper away into oblivion. He merely tenses up beneath Joe, hands going still and eyes tracing the line of hair that disappears into the fabric of Joe’s plaid boxer shorts.

“Just relax,” Joe says, leaning over to undo the buttons of Nick’s shirt. “You’re wound up so tight, Jesus. I thought you’d be calmer once summer came around, dude.”

Nick remains still against the bed, because Joe is half-naked and undressing him now, pressing him back into the bed until his shoulders hit the pillows. He lets Joe unbutton his own shirt and throw it somewhere onto the laundry pile masquerading as Joe’s bed, and he obediently raises his arms when Joe goes for the t-shirt underneath.

“Too many layers,” Joe says before leaning back down, and as he licks his way back into Nick’s mouth, Nick makes a decision.

He’s spent the last six months of his life hating his surroundings and _being_ hated by his brother, the one person on the planet he thought he could always trust. He has no idea where his career is going, and he can’t trust his father to manage it properly. Nothing he’s written has any sort of spark to it, and he spends most of his time over-thinking and overanalyzing decisions that his management team never lets him make anyway. But right now, he’s warm and happy, in a bed with someone he loves, and Nick can’t help but think that after everything he’s been going through, he kind of deserves this.

He definitely deserves a Joe who doesn’t hate him for something he’s not even sure he actually _did,_ and if this is how he’s going to get that Joe, he’ll take it with arms outstretched.

He decides to turn off his brain for a while, and lets Joe grind up against him until they both fall asleep.


	2. Chapter 2

Kevin, it turns out, works at the New York Aquarium in Brooklyn, a life choice that shouldn't surprise Nick much at all but does anyway. He still lives at home, preferring the hour-plus commute on the train to city rents – “not all of us got full-ride scholarships,” he points out without malice – and drives Frankie to football practice on the weekends.  
  
“So we got this awesome new loggerhead turtle,” Kevin enthuses from his perch in the front seat of their mom’s car. Frankie is decked out in his pads in the backseat, and Nick came along for the ride because being in the house with Joe was a little too awkward for him today – he slid out of bed before Joe had a chance to wake up, and he skulked downstairs and jumped at the first opportunity to leave with someone who wasn’t his father. “I wanted to name it Crush, after the turtle in _Finding Nemo,_ but apparently, that’s not serious-business enough. What say you, Franklin?”  
  
Frankie shrugs – Nick can tell by the slight movement of his pads. “You should have called it after one of the Ninja Turtles. Can we get cheeseburgers after?”  
  
“Only if you limit yourself to three,” Kevin says good-naturedly, and Nick smiles. _This_ is the kind of normalcy that he’d been wishing for – brothers who drive each other around and get lunch together, not brothers who rub off on each other until they’re both sticky and sweating, moaning into each others’ mouths to keep from waking up the rest of the family.  
  
 _Hey, whoever decided to do this to me? I doubt this was what you had in mind,_ Nick thinks, letting his head drop against the cold glass of the passenger-side window.  
  
*  
  
“You left early this morning,” Joe says when Nick returns later that evening. His brother is sprawled crossways across the floor of their shared bedroom with his laptop open in front of him. His hair is flopping in his face, and Nick wonders how this Joe still manages to have the patience to deal with that ridiculous flat-iron.  
  
“Yeah, I wanted to see Frank’s practice,” Nick replies in what he hopes is a nonchalant tone. “He’s…”  
  
“Violent?” Joe supplies.  
  
“Exceedingly.” Nick sits down with his back against the bedframe, cheap metal screws digging into the space above his shoulder blades. He thinks he might have inherited this bed from his grandparents; down here, on the floor, it smells vaguely of mothballs and talcum powder. “So Frankie practices with his team, then he makes Kevin get him like eight cheeseburgers, then he wants to go practice _again,_ and Kev’s like, ‘No, Frankie, it’s three in the afternoon and no one else is on the field.’ So Frank throws a fit and won’t get out of the car and hits all the locks as soon as we get onto our street, so Kevin has to turn around and drive back to the football field and then we threw stuff at him for a few hours until he fell over in exhaustion.” Nick rolls his eyes. “Mom’s kind of mad, but he’s fine. We hydrated him and everything.”  
  
It had been pretty great, actually. Nick’s usually so busy trying to make sure Frankie doesn’t feel left out of the band that he’s never really gotten to be a pain-in-the-ass older brother, and he had a surprising amount of fun aiming spiral passes at Frankie’s head. Kevin had turned to him a few times and remarked on how much better his arm was these days, and Nick had to miss a few throws to stay on course, but he’d had a couple cheeseburgers of his own and it was nice, just running around an abandoned football field behind a middle school in north Jersey like he was someone normal, for once.  
  
“You hydrated him,” Joe repeats. “He’s our little brother, Nick. Unless you’ve been going all _Little Shop of Horrors_ while I’m not around, he’s not an exotic plant.”  
  
Nick lets that reference sail over his head. “What did you do today?”  
  
“Managed to avoid killing our father, and that’s all I’m going to say on the subject for the sake of preserving your good day,” Joe replies. “ _Halo?_ ”  
  
Nick agrees, and they spend an hour and a half shooting at each other with plastic controllers until the sky goes totally dark and the rest of the house grows quiet.  
  
Joe puts down his controller without a word and rolls Nick over onto the carpet. It’s industrial-grade, cheap and scratchy, but Joe is snugged up against him and mouthing at his neck so it doesn’t really seem to matter.  
  
“You taste salty,” Joe comments, sucking lightly at the corner of Nick’s jaw and pushing his fingers between the buttons of Nick’s shirt. “You should run around and get sweaty more often.”  
  
“What, that doesn’t happen enough at school?” Nick says, curious in spite of himself. If they do this when they’re both away at school, how do they explain it? Nick must have a roommate, and people must… people must _know._ Or maybe they’re craftier than Nick gives them credit for.  
  
Joe laughs. “Unless studying counts as aerobic activity, it doesn’t happen _nearly_ enough,” and then he’s biting his way up to Nick’s mouth and they’re done talking for a while.  
  
They eventually make it back onto the bed, and Joe lies back; Nick settles on top of him, testing and tentative, and fits his hands into the space behind Joe’s neck. High summer moonlight is leaking in through the cheap mini-blinds, and through the thin slats of light, Nick can see Joe’s teeth glinting impossibly white.  
  
*  
  
Nick had hoped that he’d wake up in his own universe after the first day. Instead, he blinked awake in the same alternate world he’d woken up in the day before, with Joe draped over him again. He wonders if alternate-universe Nick had spent the night before that making out with alternate-universe Joe, and maybe _that’s_ why they seem to share beds; it happens again, and again, and again, and by the fourth day, Nick decides that he’s clearly stuck in this universe for the time being and he might as well make the best of it.  
  
He wants some insurance, though, so he seeks out the family member who’s least likely to find this behavior suspicious.  
  
*  
  
“Want to play reporter?” Nick asks a bit too eagerly, and Frankie gives him the most disdainful look a ten-year-old can offer. Nick has apparently interrupted his afternoon snack of three Gogurts and a Red Bull, and he wishes he’d remembered that Frankie generally requires food for bribery.  
  
“Why?” Frankie asks, popping open another Red Bull.  
  
“Because.” Nick pauses. “Because I haven’t seen you all year, okay? And I want to make sure I know what’s going on in your life, because I’m not sure I’m getting the whole story. So how about you interview me about you, and after that, I can interview you about me. Okay?”  
  
Frankie looks distracted and uninterested, like the Gogurt is calling his name from the depths of the refrigerator.  
  
“I’ll take you to Baskin-Robbins,” Nick says desperately, hoping his other self has enough money to cover this. “Please?”  
  
“Hmm. Okay,” Frankie replies. “Here are the terms. Nothing incriminating. No talking about girls. Twenty-minute limit. And I get a chocolate-dipped waffle cone and three different flavors.”  
  
“Whatever, great.” Nick opens up the steno pad he’d brought along in anticipation. “So ask away.”  
  
Frankie narrows his eyes. “How much has Mom told you about the detentions? Because most of those aren’t my fault.”  
  
Nick stumbles through ten minutes of grilling from Frankie and offers up a prayer to God, thanking Him for giving Nick the foresight to snoop thoroughly through Frankie’s Firefox browser history before accosting his little brother in the living room. He assures Frankie that he knows nothing about any detentions; that it’s totally okay for a fifth-grader to play with his Webkinz sometimes; that he’s totally going to be the best football player in the world and Tom Brady will have to bow down before his superior skills; and that if he ever gets his own dog, Hulkface O’Callahan is a great name for it.  
  
“Now me,” Nick says as soon as the clock ticks past the halfway point of their agreed-upon time limit, and Frankie wastes no time in telling Nick that he was class valedictorian, that he uses too many big words sometimes, that Mom worries he’s not socializing enough at school, and that he got into both Harvard and Stanford and chose the former because of its proximity to Joe.  
  
“And if you ask me, which you did, that’s weird,” Frankie says, making a face. “California is so much cooler than Boston. There’s palm trees and TV stars and Hollywood and stuff.”  
  
Nick just nods, because in his universe, Frankie has already been on television. “So as a brother, what do you think of me, overall?”  
  
Frankie looks thoughtful. “You’re okay, I guess. Not as good as Kevin, because he drives me places and gets me food all the time without making me play dumb games. But you’re really smart and really good at everything you do, which is cool, because then you teach me how to do it, too. You get really serious, but that’s why we have Joe.”  
  
Nick shakes Frankie’s hand at the end of the interview like he’s Larry King and scrounges up enough quarters to pay for his vanilla-butterscotch-watermelon sherbet sundae. He figures his little brother has earned his keep today.  
  
*  
  
Nick’s cell phone goes quiet for the first time in years, and he doesn’t think anything of the blessed silence until his mother traps him in the car on the way to Target.  
  
“Honey, I know your grades this year were great,” she begins, “but I’m a little concerned about you socializing. Are any of your friends coming to visit over the summer?”  
  
Nick’s never been one for huge circles of acquaintances – yes, internet, he sees all those jokes about having no friends outside his family and people who work for him – and he doubts much has changed over on this side of the cosmic divide. Joe’s answered a few text messages and Kevin seems to have this weird friend named Zack from the aquarium, but Nick’s phone contacts consist of family members, Harvard Emergency Services, and some place called “Wok ‘n Roll,” which he apparently calls on a twice-weekly basis. His Facebook friends number only in the double digits, and he sort of doubts he even actually speaks to half of them. “Um.”  
  
Mom stops at a light and turns to look at him. “Joseph says you spend most of your time in the library. We know you need to keep your scholarship, but college is about fun, too. It’s where your father and I met, after all.”  
  
If Nick were Joe, he’d make a face; he stares at his lap instead. “I guess freshman year was really hard?”  
  
His mother reaches across the center console and pats his hand. “I know it was, baby. So just relax a bit this summer, okay? It’s been nice to see you with the guitar again, and I know your brothers are glad to have you home.   
  
“You deserve a little break, no matter what your father says,” she adds as the light turns green.  
  
*  
  
It takes a few days before Nick has the presence of mind to think about what could be going on back in his own universe. He had started off assuming that the world had simply stopped without him around to anchor it – because like all other eighteen-year-old boys, he firmly believes that he’s the central point around which everything else pivots – but he’s in bed one night, Joe dozing off next to him, when he begins to wonder if the Nick who belongs in this world woke up in his Nashville hotel room.  
  
He assumes that his other self is just as quick on the uptake as he is, so he’s not worried about public freak-outs or returning home to _Tiger Beat_ cover stories about his long-awaited commitment to Bellevue, but he wonders how this kid is handling it all. Can the other Nick sing like he can, considering that he hasn’t been practicing? He’s clearly not going to know any of the songs he’s supposed to have written himself and played a thousand times. He’s not going to have any idea who Rob and John are; he’s not going to know any of the people who are intimately involved in planning his every move. He’ll adjust just fine to having so much money – it’s not something Nick can ever see himself complaining about – but he won’t know anything about the houses they’ve bought and the cars they drive. He’ll probably laugh in disbelief if anyone brings up dating Miley Cyrus, and he won’t have any idea where Nick’s three cell phones are.  
  
And most of all, Nick wonders what his other self is doing with Joe.  
  
If anything else, Nick now knows that his close relationship with his brother isn’t just an accident of circumstance brought on by a stunted adolescence spent on tour buses. Their room is covered in family pictures featuring both of them, goofing off at amusement parks and sitting side-by-side in the dugout at Eastern Christian baseball games, pristine white uniforms marred by dirt smears along the thighs. He’s learned that Joe visited home every other weekend while Nick was still in high school, and he made it to every single one of Nick’s debate competitions for four years running. Nick goes through Joe’s student film archive and finds himself in the credits every time, be it for holding boom mics and scooting cameras around on rickety wheeled tripods or standing on a street corner and reading lines from a cue card.   
  
He wonders if their insularity is even more off-putting in this world than it is in his own, because in the back of his mind, he’s always had a vague idea that maybe most kids don’t spend all their free time with their brothers. But Joe seems just fine, and neither Kevin nor Frankie seems to mind their closeness all that much, and Nick starts to think that the relationship he has with Joe is so firmly entrenched that not even hiccups in the space-time continuum can disrupt it.  
  
Then he remembers that his Joe’s barely speaking to him, and he really, _really_ hopes that the other Nick doesn’t try to make out with him. If he can find him, that is.  
  
“You’re thinking too loud,” Joe mutters into his shoulder. “Stop it.”  
  
Nick rolls his eyes. “How can you even tell? It’s kind of a silent activity.”  
  
“Because, like, you know how gears squeak? Well, your gears squeak.” Joe shimmies up the bed and sits halfway up, supporting himself with one elbow. “You breathe in a certain way, like you’re afraid you’re going to run out of air if you don’t take it all in fast enough.”  
  
Nick turns over and faces him. Joe looks sleepy and rumpled, hair curling up around the edges. “That is possibly one of the most absurd things I’ve ever heard in my entire life. You’re just fixated on me. Admit it.”  
  
Joe shrugs with his available shoulder. “Sure.”  
  
It sends a frisson of warmth through Nick’s body, and somewhere deep inside, he’s sure that there’s a part of him that can’t believe he’s actually _into_ this, that he’s cool with the fact that there’s a version of him out there in the multiverse who spends a significant chunk of time making out with his older brother. It’s messed up and probably illegal and definitely against the rules of the Jonas household, at least, and Nick doesn’t know how these alternate versions of themselves think this is going to end with anything other than tears and throat-shredding screams, but it just feels _so good._ Nick’s other Joe is so angry and closed off, and he just misses him so fiercely that he’ll happily take whatever he can get.  
  
And somehow, that translates to sliding his hands up into Joe’s hair and pulling him close.  
  
“I was sleeping,” Joe complains, but he opens his mouth under Nick’s and doesn’t seem all that inclined to go back to bed for quite some time.  
  
*  
  
“What do you think about the vote out in Colorado?” his father asks at breakfast the next morning, and Nick suddenly remembers that he’s supposed to be some political-science wunderkind in this world when he’s still not all that sure how many branches of government there _are,_ exactly. Is it House? Senate? Some kind of ballot resolution thingy? Hanging chads? No, that’s Florida and Nick’s still not totally certain what a chad actually _is._ Is Colorado one of the states where gay marriage happens? No, wait, Colorado is where everyone’s high all the time. Marijuana legalization? Is it legal there already? Medically allowed? Pot’s the one you smoke, right?  
  
“I think it’s going to be close,” he says, hoping that it’s not something ridiculous like banning puppies from public byways or whatever. “But we’re not going to know until after all the votes are counted, right?”  
  
Kevin puts down his glass of orange juice. “Dude, didn’t you write some article for your school paper about that one? Joe posted it all over the internet for, like, three days straight. You _hate_ Tom Tancredo. You once made a _diorama_ about how much you hate Tom Tancredo.”  
  
Joe grins. “That thing was great. You’re the world’s leading expert in the rapidly growing field of putting papier-mache miniatures of politicians inside hamster balls.”  
  
Kevin Sr. looks nonplussed. “We were all very proud of that article and the strength of your convictions, Nicholas. I’m surprised at you. If this is what you really want to do with your life, you’ve got to stay consistent.”  
  
“I still hate that guy!” Nick says quickly, hoping that’s the truth. “I’m just… you know, taking it easy.”  
  
He hears four identical gasps, and Kevin Sr. begins to turn an interesting shade of purple before Mom steps in with a new platter of fresh waffles.  
  
“I think it’s wonderful that Nick’s trying to enjoy himself,” she chides his father. “He works very hard, and you all know that. It’s not fair to grill him about politics when he’s just trying to eat his breakfast. If you want to know what’s going on in the world, I suggest you watch the news instead of relying on your poor brother to keep you informed.”  
  
“I do too watch the news,” Kevin interjects. “It’s on in the lobby at work all day. Do you want to know what the Dow Jones Industrial Average has been for the last three days?”  
  
“No,” Joe says.  
  
“Because I can tell you,” Kevin continues. “Apparently, it’s down! And that’s bad. I don’t know if they ever really explain any of it, because they always start the next part just when I have to go feed the penguins.” He makes a face. “Eugh, mutant anchovies.”  
  
Joe makes a gagging noise. “Trying to eat, here. Didn’t need that mental image.”  
  
“It’s true!” Kevin insists. “They come in a tin and everything, and they’re slimy and grey and they smell awful, and I have to throw them in a certain way or else this weird goo shoots – ”  
  
“OH MY GOD.” Joe pushes his chair back from the table, looking slightly green.  
  
“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, Joseph Adam Jonas,” thunders Kevin Sr., banging his fork on the table. “And don’t leave the table until you’ve been excused.”  
  
“I’m twenty-one years old, and Kevin is being disgusting!”  
  
“It’s my work! It’s what I do all day!” Kevin looks chagrined. “Why doesn’t anyone in this family care about what I do?”  
  
“We all care,” Kevin Sr. replies, as Joe says, “because what you do is gross.”  
  
The table devolves into a sea of indiscriminate chatter, and Nick takes the opportunity to slip out of his seat and move next to his mother, who’s standing at the sink and who saved him from having to look up Colorado politicians on his cell phone underneath the table.  
  
“Love you, Mom,” he says, and when she smiles up at him, he feels a tug, thinking about what his own version of his mother might be doing right now.  
  
*  
  
The next afternoon, Nick is munching his way through an English muffin with organic peanut butter when Kevin storms into the kitchen and drops his messenger bag to the floor with an unceremonious _thump._  
  
“I hate my life,” he says without preamble. Nick looks up, because even in this alternate universe, it’s still a very un-Kevin thing for him to say.  
  
“Why?” he asks.  
  
“Because in the last eighteen months, I have been on exactly one hundred and forty-six dates,” Kevin replies. “Do you know how many of them worked out? Zero. The girls I liked didn’t like me, the girls who liked me were awful, and I have subsequently paid for one hundred and forty-six dinners that I didn’t enjoy at all. I have eaten at ninety-three restaurants. _Ninety-three._ The waiters of New York probably think I’m some sort of male escort – no, I’m not buff enough for that. They think I’m a sad-sack loser who can’t find a girl worth seeing a second time, which is exactly what I am. Entire waitstaffs are laughing at me, Nick, and they probably get together at waiter conventions and trade stories about all the awful dates I’ve been on. I exist solely to entertain the service industry. That’s all I’m good for at this point.”  
  
“Don’t say that,” Nick answers. “Aren’t you really great with sea creatures and stuff?”  
  
“SEA CREATURES AREN’T GIRLS,” Kevin yells, dropping his head into his hands.   
  
Nick frowns, because Kevin is a wonderful human being who really should have more than sea turtles and bad internet dates in his life. If any of them really deserve happiness, it’s certainly Kevin, whose good cheer and relentless optimism are probably the only reasons their entire family hasn’t murdered each other yet.  
  
With that in mind, Nick opens his Google toolbar and runs a search for “Danielle Deleasa.” It doesn’t take long to find her; she’s working at a full-service salon in Franklin Lakes, and with a few clicks, Nick has exactly what he wants.  
  
“Come on,” he says. “You need a haircut.”  
  
The ride is long, but Kevin’s so preoccupied with his own misery that he doesn’t bother questioning it. He fiddles with the radio with such intensity that Nick’s tempted to smack his hand away, but he remembers that he’s trying to do his brother a favor, after all, and keeps his hands on the wheel. Mostly, Nick worries about whether or not this is going to work – what if this Dani is completely different? What if she really did only start going out with Kevin because of his fame and his money? What if this Kevin doesn’t even like her, anyway? What if this version of his eldest brother is into short blondes? Nick could kick himself for not fishing for more hints before launching into action.  
  
He decides to blame the impulsiveness on the Nick who actually belongs in this universe, because God knows _he’s_ never done something this serious without thinking it through. Except for all those times he’s made out with Joe, but those are _also_ other-Nick’s fault, so Nick thinks he can absolve himself of any blame but _oh God what if Kevin and Danielle HATE each other?_  
  
By the time they pull up to the salon, Kevin’s worked himself into a full-fledged funk, and Nick’s stomach is twisted into knots. Kevin and Danielle are the only stable relationship Nick even _has,_ at this point; while he and Joe both have strings of ex-girlfriends who hate their guts, Kevin somehow managed to get married to the sweetest, most supportive woman on the planet. Danielle cooks for everyone and has a secret wicked streak, and she’s always been so solid, so constant for his brother.  
  
If Kevin and Danielle don’t work in this universe, Nick’s throwing it all to hell and driving as far west as his hoopty Mustang will take him.  
  
“This is really girly,” Kevin comments suspiciously as they walk in, and Nick cringes inwardly, because he’s right. The whole place is done in cotton-candy pink, and each hairdressing station is occupied by women with tightly curled hair that probably hasn’t budged since the Nixon administration. Even the _linoleum_ is pink, and Nick’s trying to think of ways to get them the hell out of there when a softly familiar voice asks, “Can I help you?”  
  
Danielle’s hair is shorter, but she looks just the same as she does in Nick’s own universe – maybe a little paler and a little more tired, but yeah, that’s Danielle.  
  
“My brother needs a haircut,” Nick says quickly, grabbing Kevin by the shoulder and spinning him around to face her. “This is Kevin.”  
  
Kev takes one look at Danielle and breaks out into a huge smile. “Hi. Kevin. I guess I need a haircut?”  
  
“Danielle,” she replies, extending a manicured hand and smiling back. “You want to sit down and figure out how badly you need that haircut?”  
  
“Yeah, I guess I need some help with that,” Kevin says, and as they walk off to Danielle’s cramped little hairdressing station, Nick realizes that he hasn’t been this proud of something in a long, long time.  
  
Kevin’s haircut takes two and a half hours, which is approximately two hours and ten minutes longer than strictly necessary, and Nick goes through three issues of _In Touch_ and half of the _USA Today_ crossword in the reception area. They finally leave when the salon owner starts dropping hints about closing time and operating costs and electricity is _expensive, Danielle,_ and Kevin programs her number into his phone and promises to call her tomorrow. They get into the car and drive back towards the highway, and Kevin sighs happily.  
  
“Don’t even think about laughing at me, but I’m going to marry that girl,” he says, and Nick very nearly tells him that he already did.  
  
*  
  
“Can I just fuck you already?” Joe says that night, and Nick drops his book in surprise. Joe is sitting next to him in bed, tapping away on his secondhand iPhone without looking up, and Nick feels an irrational surge of irritation. Like, if his older brother wants to nail him, he could at least ask _politely._  
  
New Jersey is clearly starting to drive him insane.  
  
“Why do you get to fuck me?” Nick asks in reply, hoping his voice stays even. “Why isn’t it the other way around?”  
  
Joe rolls his eyes. “Um, I don’t know, maybe because you’ve been begging me to put my fingers up your ass every night for the last six months? God, you’re bossy.”  
  
Nick wants nothing more than to gasp – okay, maybe he wants to roll over and keep his back away from Joe and his wiggling fingers – but he controls the urge. He’s learned a lot about himself – that he’s always going to be ambitious, that he’s always going to be a little awkward, that he’s always going to love his brother – but he’s not totally okay with this one. That is something _private,_ and that’s kind of an “out” hole, and… now Joe has snaked his arm around Nick’s hips and is palming at his ass. It’s not entirely unpleasant.  
  
“Um, not tonight,” he says, making a mental note to figure out what’s so great about fingers going places fingers maybe shouldn’t go once he’s back in his own universe. His own universe, with its many soundproofed rooms and all the different kinds of lubricant he buys under the guise of having sensitive skin.  
  
Joe shrugs, the easy roll of his shoulders dragging his hand across the front of Nick’s plaid pajama pants. “Not tonight to the fucking, or not tonight to everything in general?”  
  
“Just the fucking,” Nick says quickly, because Joe’s twisting his fingers in the thin cotton covering his dick and he’d really like that to continue. “The rest of everything in general is okay, you know, minus the fucking. Yea to everything in general, abstention from the fucking.”  
  
“Contrary to what I’ve said in the past, using Senate rules of order when I’m trying to jerk you off isn’t really that much of a turn-on,” Joe grumbles, but he pulls down Nick’s waistband anyway.  
  
Joe’s pretty good at this – not as good as Nick himself, but Nick’s got _years_ of practice – and he kisses Nick thoroughly throughout, tongue dipping into the dark corners of his mouth and making Nick gasp. He guides Nick’s hand down to his own black boxers, and when Nick works his hand inside the front slit, Joe moans into Nick’s mouth like he’s never wanted anything more in his entire life.  
  
“Yeah, like that,” he stutters, hips arching as Nick drags his hand along the smooth shaft. “A little harder – oh, oh, okay, you’ve got it.”  
  
They’re going faster now, panting into each other’s mouths, and Nick presses their foreheads together like they’re getting ready to do a show. Joe’s straight hair is beginning to tangle with sweat, and his lips are bitten red; his lashes brush against Nick’s hairline, and not for the first time, Nick thinks his brother is the most beautiful creature on earth.  
  
Nick twists his hand over the head of Joe’s dick and Joe explodes, groaning into Nick’s neck and getting Nick’s hand all damp-sticky with come. He lets himself come a moment later, head of his dick pushed up against Joe’s belly, and he spurts hard when Joe bites into the meat of his shoulder.  
  
They lie tangled together for a bit, until Joe groans and whips off his t-shirt. “This rule you have about the first one coming having to clean up is annoying. I clean up, like, seventy-five percent of the time, because you play dirty.”  
  
Nick shrugs and smiles, because it sounds like something he’d do. He lets Joe drag the shirt across his hands and his softening dick, peels off his pajama pants and slides between the sheets. Joe emerges from the bathroom a minute later, naked and slightly brown from the sun, and when he climbs back into bed, Nick can’t stop himself from swiping a hand through the beads of water on his stomach.  
  
He doesn’t know if he’ll want Joe like this when he gets back to his own world, but right now, it’s what’s keeping him sane. If he and Joe can be like – like _this_ – in this world, then they can at least fix what’s gone wrong in their own.  
  
He’s not normal by any stretch of the imagination, and he’s beginning to realize that’s just plain fact no matter _what_ universe he’s in.  
  
“I love you,” Nick says suddenly, because it’s true, and he feels Joe smile against the back of his neck as he drifts off to sleep.  
  
*  
  
The next morning, Nick wakes up in an empty hotel room with zero missed phone calls and a BlackBerry that tells him that in _this_ universe, absolutely no time has passed whatsoever.  
  
He calls John Fields and postpones their next session by a few days, and he’s on a flight to LAX before the hotel staff even puts out the complimentary continental breakfast. He’s jittery the whole time, wide awake while the other passengers are sleeping, and he practically catapults his way off the plane before realizing that they’ve been diverted to Phoenix.  
  
He seriously considers renting a car and driving the rest of the way, but the modicum of common sense he has remaining keeps him at Sky Harbor International Airport until he scores a 5:30 flight into Los Angeles. He’s the first one down the boarding ramp, and he races to the beginning of the taxi line so fast that no one even realizes that it’s Nick Jonas who’s cutting in front of them.  
  
There are no other cars in the driveway except for Joe’s, and when Nick rings the doorbell, his brother answers with a spatula in his hand.  
  
“You’re supposed to be in Nashville,” Joe says.  
  
“I’m supposed to be in Nashville,” Nick repeats.  
  
“This isn’t Nashville.” Joe gestures outside at what Nick guesses is supposed to mean California. “You are aware of that fact, right?”  
  
His tone is edgy and Nick tries to remember that he’s been spoiled; he’s been with a Joe who has no comprehension of the famous life, a Joe who goes to the mall unnoticed and who’s never even met Demi Lovato. He’s been with a Joe who loves him more than anything else in the world, and Nick has to remind himself that this Joe does, too. This Joe is angry and hurt, but he’s still the same boy who passed out in fear when Nick was hospitalized, who clapped so hard at Nick’s first solo show that he gave himself blisters, who turned himself into the spastic frontman of their band just to give Nick a chance to breathe, for once. This Joe loves him just as much as the other one, and that’s just plain, obvious fact.  
  
But this is real life, and real life is always going to be a little bit harder.  
  
He stares at Joe, standing in the doorway with his glasses slipping down his nose and his spatula dripping tomato sauce on the ceramic tile, and Nick prepares himself to return to reality.  
  
“I miss you,” he says bluntly, and Joe steps aside to let Nick into the house.  
  
It’s neat as a pin inside, and Nick knows now that there haven’t been any wild, uproarious parties; everything is still pristine and new, tabletops shining and couch cushions situated exactly where they should be. There’s only one pair of shoes sitting outside the living room door, and they’re Joe’s favorite high-top Nikes, the ones with the bright red swoosh. The kitchen is a little bit messier, but not by much; the table in there is set for one person, and there’s a book open next to the placemat.  
  
“Garbo and Jack said I was depressing them, so they’ve been in Jersey for the last two weeks,” Joe offers quietly. He’s still standing in the foyer, and when situated against the archways like this, he looks smaller than ever before.  
  
Nick turns around and leans against the counter, crossing his arms and watching Joe as he walks into the kitchen and plucks another place setting from the dishwasher. He opens a few drawers and comes up with another placemat, one that doesn’t match, and Nick remains silent as Joe clears the unopened mail off the table and sets another place.  
  
They eat spaghetti and meatballs, and Joe tells Nick all about how the producers he’s working with don’t think his voice is right for the songs he’s trying to record. Joe’s determined to win the war, but he’s losing battles left and right, and it’s hard for him to keep his focus on the finished product when no one thinks he’ll even get there in the first place.  
  
“I know I can do it,” Joe says, “but no one’s telling me that I can, and it’s hard. You know?”  
  
Nick knows a hint when he sees one. “You can do it. Of _course_ you can do it.”  
  
Joe grins around a mouthful of breadstick, and it’s so endearing that Nick forgets to be grossed out. “Hey, Joe?”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“Do you ever wish we weren’t, you know, _us?”_ Nick asks, and Joe looks pensive for a moment.  
  
“Nah,” he says. “I like us the way we are.”  
  
Nick smiles, and they get up to load their plates into the dishwasher. Joe drags him into the living room and turns on the plasma-screen television, flipping around until he finds a baseball game for Nick to watch. They’re quiet for a few innings, and Joe slides over on the couch until they’re side-by-side, pressed flush together down to the hip. He drops his head onto Nick’s shoulder and sighs deeply, and Nick slings an arm around him.  
  
“I miss you, too,” Joe eventually says, and Nick knows then that while they may never be normal, they’re always, always going to be okay.


End file.
